Lokniti Official

The Lokniti Programme for Comparative Democracy was established in 1997 as a research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. CSDS is an autonomous social science research institute. Founded in 1963 by political scientist Rajni Kothari, CSDS has primarily been involved in studying and understanding the democratic and electoral politics of India and its neighborhood, and much of this has been done through sustained empirical work by scholars of politics. The writings of Rajni Kothari, D.L. Sheth and Ashis Nandy have become a point of reference for various attempts from the South to question the global establishment view of democracy. CSDS has argued in favour of a more humane holistic view of democracy that goes beyond democratic institutions and processes in their narrow sense and emphasizes the survival of dissent and cultural contents of the civil society as central concerns of democracy.